Creative musings in bright colors

Posts tagged ‘Moyra’

Oops! I meant to post this on Friday but I ended up accidentally throwing a party instead and forgot. Sorry! Anyway, This was just a fun little floral! Fitting for almost-summer.

The new polish here is called Morgan by Zoya. What you see here is three thin coats, although I could have gotten away with two thicker coats. This is a bright blue-leaning pink, and it is quite pretty! I have been hunting for more medium tone pink cremes, and although this one is slightly darker than I was hoping for, the color borders on neon and it was fun to wear.

This was just fun to put together! This time I did two coats of Sakura over a white creme just to save some polish on Sakura. It looks just as good! I don’t know why I decided a gradient shattered stamp over it would be a good idea, but I like the end result. Was this still painful to remove? Yes. Was it worth it? Yep!

I love the concept behind this nail art, but I’m honestly not sure I love the execution? I think this design is busy enough that it would work better as an accent nail and not a full mani. So, just pick one or two nails and stare at them I guess!

This mani was time-consuming because instead of using striping tape I used stamps and freehand to make everything. Basically, I stamped the initial gold triangle at my cuticle with Penny Talk and then filled in the design (which was hollow) with Juliette. Once that was top coated and dried, I did the rest. I stamped with a black creme polish the black chevrons, and then the rose gold chevron again (each was an individual stamp…so there are 4 stamps on each nail except my thumb which was 6). I then colored in the black stamps with Storm, and did my best to spare the crossing rose gold. I could have just stamped with Penny Talk after the black was all dry, but that would be ANOTHER layer of top coat and drying and I was feeling lazy. So I colored around it :-p….it probably took longer anyway.

Again, needlessly complicated, but in the end kinda cool? I’ve been back on a bit of a geometric kick recently. I wish I had time for some freehand, I’ve been feeling inspired! That’s all for today, for Friday we get back to colors and some flowers! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

This came out better than I expected! It is very hard to see the teal metallic stamping polish, but the colors go nicely and I have missed geometrics 🙂

When I start a manicure I generally have an idea in mind ahead of time. With this one, I just went “i want to use that one sparkly blurple with teal flakie polish” and tried to find coordinating colors. Don’t ask me why coloring in some of the thinnest lines on one of my stamping plates was deemed a good idea, but the result is pretty cool!

I need to remember to buy more flakie polishes, they have wonderful color shifts and finishes but are not difficult to remove. Also they tend to have enough going on in them that even if you paint quickly enough to cause bubbles (because rushes are a real thing) you can’t see them!

In case you can’t tell, the theme this year was “slightly unusual Valentine’s day art”, so I ended up with a lot of “love” and a lot of purple :-p. The fun thing here is the purple-on-purple background stamp (you can see it best on my ring finger) and THEN the purple to white gradient stamping. Basically lots of stamps!

The base color here is Lael by Zoya, a very dark blue-leaning purple cream. As with most Zoya creams, Lael is opaque in two thin coats, and is predictably a dream to work with. I should at some point do a comparison of all my dark purple Zoya cremes (I think I own 3 very similar ones at this point) but this is the darkest in my collection! My other darkest purple Zoya Monica, looks greyed-out in comparison to the intense dark purple of Lael.

There is one more Valentines manicure in the wings for Monday (which only makes sense since my husband and I are celebrating on Sunday…at the moment I am on a day shift and he is on a nights shift so we hardly see each other!). Hope you enjoyed!

Yes, there is a gradient from blue-to-purple and a black stamp. There is ALSO a reversed stamp (purple-to-blue) under the black one made of swirls, it just does’t show up well!

I couldn’t decide if this looked more like cobblestones (which was the intention) or funky corn. I have seen images on line with other bloggers using the stamp as corn and it looks amazing, so I might stick with that in the future! Although it means I will have to paint my nails yellow (wwwww).

That’s it for this week! Hopefully I can get my act together and put together something a little more interested for next week (or at least aim for a theme that isn’t “stamped”). I did 3-4 valentines-themed manicures so that’s what will hopefully get posted! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

I have a degree in engineering from undergrad, and I have always loved putting little bits of electronics on my nails! There was no particular inspiration for this manicure, I just saw the image on the Matrix plate and decided I wanted to go for it 🙂

I also decided that the dark greenish-grey of Yuna would make a perfect base, especially with the scattered golden glitter! I think I was right. This mani is a bit busy but I kinda love it.

Again, a fast easy manicure! I swear I will have time to edit some of my more intricate nail art soon. I’m currently still in relax-from-step-3-but-freak-out-about-buying-a-house mode. It is a very complicated mode. Hope you enjoyed!

Simple mani today! One of my most opaque polishes (I do love A England) and two complimentary stamps. This whole manicure took 20 minutes and most of that was waiting for the burgundy polish to dry!

Honestly, I feel like I should start using white or black polish to stamp (or at least a creme finish) because in half the lights things like silver and gold look black! Oh well. It is shiny, and that makes me happy!

Not much else to say today. I have officially started what I think will end up being the most boring and paper-work intensive month of my 4-year residency. If history holds true, I will paint my nails a LOT (I started painting my nails 6 or so years ago on a very similar rotation), so that at least is something to look forward to! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

This mani is a mess. I wanted to make something subtle and swirly, and decided to give Sandy a second shot. The first time I used this polish it took 4 coats and was still barely opaque…and since it has a lot of glitter and flakies, it was quite thick. This mani ALSO took 4 coats and honestly I give up. Sandy is moving to my “pretend this is a topper” section in my nail art room.

It also doesn’t help that on my easier-to-image left hand I decided to plan out where each part of my swirly stamp was going to go…and on my right hand I just winged it. The right hand looked much better in the end! But I took very few photos because the photos of my left always come out better. Silly me.

Honestly, my nails were too long (that never happens!) for the nail art I was trying to create here! So I improvised a bit. I think the original might be better! It also kinda looks like one chevron (the black one) was bolded in my version, so voila, title!

The design was inspired by Penelope Luz, but her version is beautifully minimalist. Mine has more color. And glitter.

Sorry that the posts this week have been late/only a few photos, I’ve been sick! My husband it a pediatrician which means the kiddos give him lots of bugs. This time they gave him a respiratory virus and he had the courtesy to pass it on to me first time I’ve been sent home early from the hospital!

Anyway, on to nail art! This design was loosely inspired by @gabbysnailart. I love the colors but I personally wanted more glitter. Of course, the glitter is a LOT harder to remove than creme polish, but it is so sparkly! I don’t know what I thought I was doing stamping with Rosewater and then trying to color over the stamp, but here we are!

So, being honest, I don’t love this mani. I was a little pressed for time and wanted to both stamp something cool, and use the colors that the nail polish base was designed after. Since the polish is called You Look Like Seafood in honor of Tamatoa from Moana, that meant fuchsia and gold. And unfortunately, this is where I ended up!

This is three thin coats of You Look Like Seafood! by Dreamland polish. I love love LOVE this nail polish…the blue base, the pink shimmer, the flakies, the whole thing is stunning. I also really only needed two coats, I added the third just for a bit more depth. That said, I hate the brush on the polish! There was no way NOT to flood my pinky as the brush was both wide and not curved. 😦

This was also the first time I played with the Moyra Cuts plate, I have used it many times since but I was still working with how to stamp large swatches here! Luckily my polishes were quite opaque :-p. Hope you enjoyed this more than I did!

This was INTENDED to be my New Years manicure, but I decided it made more sense to post my Top 10 early and these late! But, they are sparkly, shifty, and weirdly colored (which I think will end up being a theme this week).

I am not sure why I decided that Walrus went well with Chance, but I was fiddling with colors and I ended up here. Orange with green is not my typical go-to but I kinda like how it turned out! I also really like this stamp 😀

I feel like this is a very descriptive title. And I feel like this mani would have been boring…if not for the fact that the red base is a thermal! I didn’t bother trying to catch all the color shifting, since this is an old one that you guys have seen before. BUT, I did capture it how it existed 90% of the time: as a gradient!

This was basically just me having fun with thermal polish and a swoopy stamp. Of course, I used gold, because what else does one use with red? As a result it accidentally came out Christmas-y!

This mani took a bit of work because of the double stamping! And also because working with sheer polish makes me nervous so it takes a lot longer to get anything done.

The steps to this one were basically sheer polish, stamp with gold dots, then stamp with rainbow dots. The exciting part was that I got a liquid metallic polish from Sally Hansen (back when mirror nails were all the rage) to stamp! It is such a perfect shiny gold but it usually dries to fast for stamping. Which goes to show that this plate is well etched. And since I was stamping in colors over it, I didn’t care if every part of the design was 100% filled in. I’ll have to play with it some more in the near future!

That is a LOT of colors. Anyway, hope you enjoyed! Maybe I’ll actually have some seasonal nails up starting next week? I have a bunch of snowflake and dark color manis done, but I haven’t even put them on my computer much less edited them yet!

More blurple! Other than nude, purple/blurple/periwinkle is probably my most used color this year (I don’t know why). It is also easily my most-bought polish family this year!

This particular color combination was REALLY tone-on-tone, and yet worked well! The scrubs I have to wear when I am on ICU blocks and in the emergency department are a pastel periwinkle-grey…which sounds pretty but lets be honest scrubs do not look good on ANYONE (and I am no exception). That said, when my nails match my scrubs I feel a tad bit classier than I have any right to when wearing scrubs! Hence all the blurple and periwinkle nails (never fear, there are more coming in the next few weeks :-p).

This title is odd. I was trying to figure out what this mani looked like, and my husband thinks it looks like ikea furniture. Honestly, I can kinda see it. I got a new stamper for free for buying farrrr too many stamping plates from Whats up Nails during their stamping sale. Ooops! Anwyay the stamper is huge and squishy and SUPER see-through and honestly worked perfectly on the first try. It is also amazing for layering. My older (and beloved) clear stamper couldn’t have aligned these so easily!

So anyway I wanted to stamp this fun triangle pattern in black, and then go over it shifted in white to make a funky striped triangle pattern. I did that on my middle and ring fingers (and it was so easy to align, it was almost unfair, this stamper is awesome). Then I decided that I liked the design better with just the black stamp alone! So I left my other three fingers without any white at all.

The sad end to this story is that I got a bit of polish on the covered end of the stamper, and I tried to wipe it off with acetone. I should have known better. DO NOT USE ACETONE ON PLASTIC…now it is no longer opaque! I want to cut the end off so that the whole thing is hollow (and useable) but I can’t find my hand-saw. So, sadly, I am now back to one useable see-through stamper.

Magnets! I love magnetics. They make my nails look cool with little-to-no effort on my part other than holding still for a few seconds. Stamping over them just looks so cool!

Anyway, this was basically just having fun with straight magnets and some silver stamps. The magnetic polish is a teal-to-black called Whitehall by Nails Inc. The silver is Excalibur by A England and the stamp is from Moyra plate 50 – Ornaments 3.

To make this, I applied the straight line magnet on a diagonal on all the nails except my thumb. The magnet is super strong the raised teal line was incredibly sharp…until it wasn’t. As always happens, the magnetic turning point blurred as the polish dried, so I went from a super sharp line to a smudge, but it still looks cool. Honestly, maybe I need thinner coats of polish! On my thumb I tried to create a curved pattern using the small circular end of the magnetic stick. I love it. I think making this nail was more fun than using the straight line!

The double-headed magnet that I used is from the Born Pretty Store, and it is both cheap and works well. You can find it for $2.99.

I really have been on a purple kick! This seems to be a theme. I like purple, what can I say!

At least for this mani I have an excuse: I used my swatch nails from the Purple Metallics to create these! I just added two stripes of a different color to each nail, creating a very crude gradient of random purple metallic. I then stamped with some twirls, and voila! Not half bad honestly.

This is also my last post with four photos rather than three for a while…it takes me around 30 minutes to edit each photo to my satisfaction and I haven’t had time for two hours per post! So three photos it is. This one has four though because I edited in stages and, as previously stated, I like purple :-p. I have a hunch my more loved manis are going to get 4 (and the just ok ones will get three).

Anyway, hope you enjoyed! Happy Friday! I am quite excited because although I am on call today (this was pre-posted since I am sleeping in the hospital tonight), I only have 3 more ICU call days this block! And I get to go see Jersey Boys tomorrow! For FREE! 😀

Eeep! Sorry for the extended absence…after moving a WEEK ago, AT&T failed to install our internet and we didn’t get wifi until today! So this really is the first time I could have posted :-p

Anyway, this mani is wayyy too complicated! A stamp this complicated needs a creme-on-creme finish, none of this playing with 5 colors of holographic glittery purple and stamping in silver. I love the stamps but this is too much!

I also likely should not have added dots. Oops! Live and learn. It’s still kinda fun!